New York in 1997 is not even a nice place to visit. In any case, you can't leave: the Bronx is still up, but the Battery's in lock-down, Manhattan's a maximum-security prison and chock full o' nuts. Mines and radar create a walled city from which Kurt Russell is charged with charting an escape route for kidnapped president Donald Pleasance. O.k., so Escape from New York is "the kind of movie that calls for an immediate suspension of disbelief," as Arthur Knight understated, but the interest here is in a futuristic New York whose exteriors were shot in a burned-out section of St. Louis and in Los Angeles (in Chinatown's infamous L.A. River), and whose "interiors" suggest new uses for old rapid-transit routes. But Urban Revisions is a fairy tale compared to this dystopia. Like Blade Runner, it's a cynical extrapolation of "white flight" ("no guards inside, only the prisoners and the world they have made"), but also like Blade Runner, Escape posits a virtual city whose map is pure cinema.